My love for content began many years ago when I was a middle schooler who had just discovered YouTube. I excitedly consumed this new content everyday, but I had no idea what it would lead to. As I grew up and social media grew as well, I developed an increased interest in social media content and how it works. There’s a lot that goes into creating content, but some might not realize how important the other part of content is–strategy. 

What is Content Strategy?

In November 2021, I took on the role of Social Media Manager for an e-commerce sporting goods company, Gear2Compete. Not only have I gained experience in content creation through this role, but I’ve gained content strategy experience as well. Catherine Toole explains in a YouTube video for Nielsen Norman Group that what some might think is content strategy is actually content tactics. Choosing which platforms to use and how to distribute your content are considered tactics, which I also use. Toole describes strategy as finding a balance between what the users want and need and what the business needs. She explains that the content strategist needs to identify what the point of the content is because you don’t want content just for the sake of content. 

Staying Organized

The content I work with is primarily digital, and keeping it all organized is crucial. After all, you can’t use strategy if you can’t even locate your assets. My method of choice to stay organized is to use folders on my computer. I have one big folder for work, labeled Gear2Compete, with many subfolders labeled based on the content that the folder contains. The content I work with is primarily sporting goods, so my subfolders are mostly labeled by the product or campaign. I can easily find things when I need them this way. Also, we often will reuse content, so I can always go back and find content for specific products. To decide what old content is worth keeping, it depends on the likelihood that it will be used again, and if it’s even worth it for your audience and your business to use again. Sporting goods can be used again because unless a product is completely out of stock and not coming back, we will always have more to sell and therefore we’ll want to utilize the content to market our products. 

How to Start Using Content Strategy

When I first joined Gear2Compete, they didn’t have strong content or strategy. In Meghan Casey’s book, The Content Strategy Toolkit, Casey describes scenarios in which you’d want to figure out what’s wrong with your content. One of which is that “you just know deep down in your heart that your content could and should better meet the needs of your organization and its audiences,” which was the case at Gear2Compete. I began by figuring out exactly what was going wrong. The main issue was that before me, they hadn’t hired anyone with a strong background in social media. All of their content was posted without much thought, and there were other issues such as low-quality photos, typos, and links that went nowhere. I documented this and presented it, along with what I wanted to do moving forward to fix it. Gear2Compete’s audience needs and business needs were pretty clear to me. The audience needs good quality sporting goods at good prices and the business needs to sell the products. Users won’t know that they can buy quality products from us if all of our photos are blurry and we’re not even linking them properly.

Use Grammarly

Typos are extremely unprofessional and one of my biggest pet peeves when I come across them on a business’s page. In 2021, Brody Dorland from DivvyHQ shared “5 Essential Tools a Content Strategist Can’t Do Without.” Dorland says that you should “Save time (and embarrassment) with Grammarly…When you add all the written material your in-house copywriters create plus any work you outsource to freelancers, that’s a lot of chances for errors. Hopefully you have dedicated editors who proof all that, but even then, typos and punctuation issues are inevitable.” I love Grammarly and I often use it to double-check my writing for content. Even the best writers and editors in the world can slip up, and Grammarly is a great way to combat that. 

After a couple of years at Gear2Compete, I’ve improved their content and their strategies. The business now has an increased presence on social media, as well as growth in their sales. This proves that having a strategy is key, and all types of businesses can benefit from it.